Brands sound off on their frustrations with AI: ‘It’s like what VR was a few years ago’

AI is the biggest buzzword in marketing today, but real applications of the technology are still coming along sluggishly.

That was the major takeaway from brand marketers, who convened in Santa Barbara, California on Wednesday for the Digiday AI Marketing Summit. During a closed-door town hall session, they aired out their frustrations with AI’s ambiguity and their challenges incorporating AI into their businesses. Below are highlights that have been edited for clarity.

Too much noise, not enough signal
“The biggest frustration I have is AI is the new buzzword. And it’s really for the most part from vendors.”

“It’s like what VR was a few years ago.”

“I think we’ve been using ‘artificial intelligence’ in different variants for a while, but there’s a fuzziness around what it can and cannot do and sometimes overpromises.”

“Sometimes people are like, ‘Let’s just have machines do everything.’ You can’t.”

“There’s a lot of skepticism of the word ‘bot’ and by extension AI technology in general.”

Data is the dealbreaker
“If you don’t have the data, then you don’t even want to touch AI. AI’s whole focus is to collect all the data and learn from it.”

“We’ve been de-siloing as an industry in terms of where the data resides for both dot-com and in-store and making that data so it can be utilized for AI is a challenge.”

“Since we don’t sell products directly, [proving the value of AI for ROI] is very difficult because retailers don’t like to share data.”

“In order to make models work, you need hundreds of millions of data points. A complex machine learning algorithm can’t have a small data set.”

“No one is gonna get offended if you get an ad wrong. As long as the [brand] sending it has usually been right. It’s all good, man.”

Internal friction
“It takes a lot of work to promote AI internally. It takes a huge staff, and then you have to have a manager who understands what they’re doing. A lot of the time you have to outsource it and cut your losses.”

“We have a huge IT department, but each individual business unit has its own IT team. When it comes to investing in AI, marketing might have a different point of view from other departments. And if they’re not talking to other areas of the business or IT is not talking to other areas of the business about how to use AI, that’s a challenge.”

“People need to understand that, when you’re trying to build and do something with AI for the first time, there will be a lot of challenges and times when you need to stop what you’re doing and rebuild.”

“The big question is, when you think of what is the cost of AI. It touches all these different teams. Who should pay for it? It’s a very cross organizational technology. Thats what makes it tricky with budgets.”

AI is in specific departments but nobody is prioritizing it because it runs across the fabric of the organization. That’s the biggest roadblock. Everyone can’t prioritize it. So nobody does.”

“It’s the tragedy of the commons. Someone ultimately has to be responsible for risks and rewards. You need one throat to choke.”

The post Brands sound off on their frustrations with AI: ‘It’s like what VR was a few years ago’ appeared first on Digiday.

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After stopping ads on Snapchat and YouTube, Captain Morgan focuses on Facebook and Spotify

Two of the early winners in Diageo’s crackdown on murky online media are Facebook and Spotify.

Both platforms are at the heart of Diageo rum Captain Morgan’s latest campaign focused on 18- to 24-year-old drinkers. Having partnered with U.K. grime artist Lady Leshurr to bring credibility to its responsible drinking message, Captain Morgan expects to reach 4.3 million people in the U.K. and Ireland with the #LiveLikeACaptain promotion over the next quarter. None of those people, however, will see the ads on YouTube or Snapchat.

This is Captain Morgan’s first campaign since Diageo pulled ads from YouTube out of concern they could appear against inappropriate videos on YouTube and did the same for Snapchat over filters used by kids. People can still go to YouTube to watch the Captain Morgan ads, which are versions of a longer music video for Lady Leshurr, as Diageo hasn’t paid to place and target them. “Unfortunately, we’re not working with Snapchat anymore, and we’re not actually buying media with YouTube anymore,” said Amy Mooney, Captain Morgan’s head of Europe. “But Facebook and Instagram are still key platforms for us, as is Spotify. We want to reach millions of people.”

“While Facebook is attending to important privacy and user security issues, the Cambridge Analytica development is quite different from the brand-safety scandal that arose last year when brands found their ads — or rather, journalists found their ads — running alongside extremist content on YouTube,” said Aaron Goldman, CMO at analytics firm 4C Insights. “As long as the performance is there, advertisers will continue to invest in Facebook advertising.”

Captain Morgan is trying shorter videos, sometimes as short as two seconds, in the campaign.

“We’re probably a bit of a nightmare for our creative agency because we end up giving them a list of assets of every format possible to create for,” said Mooney. “What we don’t want to do is try and get someone to watch a 30-second TV ad on Facebook because it won’t work. We’re playing with different lengths and different types of messaging or levels of branding because we’re conscious of not trying to bombard them.”

Impressions aren’t always the end goal for Captain Morgan’s ads, said Mooney. Increasingly, the brand is looking at how posts drive people to supermarket sites, to redeem vouchers in pubs and to talk to the recently launched chatbot version of the Captain Morgan character.

In the absence of YouTube and Snapchat, Diageo has also cozied up to Spotify. It recently launched a Smirnoff-branded feature on the streaming player that lets listeners create a personalized playlist that balances the ratio of male to female artists they listen to. For Captain Morgan, the Lady Leshurr track is being pushed out on Spotify, with Sponsored Sessions and video takeovers used to promote it. Spotify’s wealth of data has allowed it to balance broad demographic targeting with more niche audience preferences, according to a Captain Morgan spokesperson. Targeting not only the 18-24 demographic with campaign messaging, Captain Morgan is also aiming for regular listeners of hip-hop and grime who it believes are more likely to engage with the ad.

“We thought about how we could be on platforms like Spotify in a way that people were actually going to pay attention to it rather than just see it as another big corporate initiative that says don’t drink too much,” said Mooney.

The post After stopping ads on Snapchat and YouTube, Captain Morgan focuses on Facebook and Spotify appeared first on Digiday.

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The post Ad Rate Impact And Possible Regulation: Facebook Addresses Data Privacy Fallout appeared first on AdExchanger.

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